Black Panther:" Some Thoughts on Anti-Colonialism, Feminism, Xhosa, and Black Pixels in the Film (With an Aside on Ava Duvernay’S "A Wrinkle in Time")
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Swarthmore College Works English Literature Faculty Works English Literature 2019 "Black Panther:" Some Thoughts On Anti-Colonialism, Feminism, Xhosa, And Black Pixels In The Film (With An Aside On Ava DuVernay’s "A Wrinkle In Time") Peter Schmidt Swarthmore College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits ouy Recommended Citation Peter Schmidt. (2019). ""Black Panther:" Some Thoughts On Anti-Colonialism, Feminism, Xhosa, And Black Pixels In The Film (With An Aside On Ava DuVernay’s "A Wrinkle In Time")". English Literature Faculty Works. DOI: 10.24968/2476-2458.engl.346 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit/346 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Literature Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Black Panther : Some Thoughts on Anti-Colonialism, Feminism, Xhosa, and Black Pixels in the Film (with an aside on Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time) Peter Schmidt Swarthmore College Amidst the acclaim Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther has rightly received, there are some vociferous debates going on about the film’s portrait of Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). See the Boston Review website, for example, with Christopher Lebron’s essay asking why the character who most strongly articulates an anti-white supremacy and anti- colonialist vision is cast as the primary villain.1 Good question. But in making his case, Lebron gets some things seriously wrong about both Killmonger and T'Challa. What the movie stresses (via a newly created backstory for Killmonger written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole) is that Erik Killmonger's in part a creation of the U.S. endless war, “anti-terrorist” machine. He gets his nickname and new identity in Afghanistan, and it is there that he learns to weaponize his rage. Killmonger’s global vision is focused primarily on military power & revenge (thus his irrational burning of Wakanda’s blue healing plant garden). In the process, Killmonger becomes the thing he hates. Perhaps that’s why his first name is spelled with a Germanic “k”: Erik. Names in comics and other allegorical forms of story telling are almost always heavily symbolic, telling us how to interpret the characters. Consumed by anger and a vision of weaponry and power as the solution to his anger and hurt, without any irony he channels the British Empire's slogan of wanting to create an empire upon which “the sun never sets” as his boast, his dream. Killmonger’s allegedly pan-African vision has little in common with (say) W. E. B. DuBois’s, or with the original Black Panther Party’s views about racism and colonialism in the 1960s—both of which centered on a critique of colonialism. But understanding and feeling Killmonger’s rage is crucial for understanding and feeling the movie. As Aviva Chomsky has pointed out, “Not only does the film take on the political 1 https://bostonreview.net/race/christopher-lebron-black-panther 1 economy of colonialism in Africa, it also raises the question of how colonialism shaped the African diaspora.”2 Despite having vibrant heroines, the movie is primarily patriarchal, with the implication that so are all African nations or tribes. The drama at the heart of the film is this: which male will be King? But shadowing that drama is a backstory of Black patriarchal betrayal: Killmonger’s abandonment or rejection as a child. Hurt and angry, Killmonger turns to a different authority-figure, the American military, and then eventually kills that “father”—while keeping its weapons—and seeks to conquer Wakanda. In a profoundly moving but also disturbing way, the African diaspora’s sense of homelessness, abandonment, lost ancestral roots, and betrayal, is embodied in Killmonger. And he seeks revenge against Africa, not just against white colonialism. Killmonger is at least as angry at Wakandan leadership as he is at white supremacy. T’Challa has to fight Killmonger because in confronting him he is combatting a particular, partly American- formed vision of Black power that says victory can only be achieved via a Black empire of world domination and subjugation that outdoes all previous colonial empires. Killmonger’s probably the best “villain” in the Marvel universe because he’s not inherently evil, but was made evil—a tragic hero fated with a tragic flaw, not just a villain with reams of scars. And we should remember that some of the best heroes in the world of comics have as their motivation avenging the murder of a parent. The movie’s script thus points to a tragic irony: identifying with the slaves and victims of history (most clearly present in his moving death speech), Killmonger is even more profoundly identifying with the enslavers, their murderous power and their drive to maximize profits. Don’t forget that most of those scar marks on his buff body signify kills he made working for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. (Others represent kills done in the U.S., for reasons I wish the script had explored further: who were those victims?) 2 Aviva Chomsky, “Why Black Panther Is Revolutionary, Even Though It Isn’t.” Common Dreams website, 28 Feburary 2018. Chomsky also argues that “Killmonger’s vision for black liberation has been distorted, not by his advocacy of violence to overthrow white supremacy, but by the non-Wakandan, American, white supremacist world that formed him. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/28/why-black-panther-revolutionary-even-though-it-isnt 2 Let’s consider a little more carefully the root cause of Killmonger’s agony and how it is represented in Black Panther. It all begins with his father. N’Jobu (Sterling K. Brown), is killed by T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka, in revenge for helping Ulysses Klaue obtain Vibranium. Why N’Jobu would so betray Wakanda is unexplained, or if it was I missed it. N’Jobu hardly needed whatever money Klaue offered him. A different, intriguing possibility presents itself: perhaps N’Jobu’s foolhardy greed is an allegorical repetition of the sin of those African kings who for a quick profit sold a different kind of priceless African resource—Africans themselves—to European slavers. In late modernity (however you date the “present” time in which Black Panther is set), the dreadful history of slavery repeats itself with new variations. For his sin N’Jobu was killed, and as a further punishment T’Chaka disowned and abandoned N’Jobu’s son, T’Challa’s young cousin, and he grows up to become Killmonger.3 The scene in Oakland, California, where Killmonger is disowned by his uncle is powerfully recreated in the movie through a film montage juxtaposing and repeating scenes from two stages of Killmonger’s life, as a boy and then as a man who returns to the scene of the crime, so to speak. In both moments of time he cries. The anger that arises can never be healed by weaponry, nor by however many kills he obtains.4 When Killmonger turns his gaze to Wakanda, he wants to do a makeover on it, turning it from isolationism, a kind of Switzerland in Africa, into the greatest imperial Empire the world has ever seen. His first gift to Wakanda’s leadership: the body of Ulysses Klaue. It’s as if he has put in his body bag a corpse symbolizing white colonialism itself, its depredation of African resources, including its people. Yet Killmonger’s anger focuses laser-like on Wakanda as well, his certainty that it has betrayed him. His only way of 3 Black Panther’s indictment of certain African kings for profiting from slavery should NOT be interpreted as saying “Africa was guilty for slavery too.” Whites profited far more greatly from the slave trade, slave labor, and slave breeding, and bear by far the biggest share of guilt. But unfortunately when it comes to Black slavery there is more than enough guilt to go around. One driving force of Black Panther could arguably be said to be these questions: what reparations are due for slavery? How should they be paid? 4 An aside: there’s an intriguing essay to be done on the role of men’s tears in the movie, most notably T’Challa’s and Killmonger’s. Do any of the women ever cry? How should we understand T’Challa’s tears? 3 conceiving how Black Power can be recognized in this evil world is to conceive of it as a colonial empire with a secret ingredient, one that will be even more dominant and violent than previous ones, whether British, Dutch, German, Belgian, or French—or American. For Killmonger, racist power concedes nothing without a fight; he aims to change the balance of power by arming Black people all over the world with weapons powered by Vibranium. This too has deep echoes in Oakland history and in the history of Black Panther militancy. As one article in the LA Times recalled, “The Panthers were initially a kind of neighborhood watch for Bay Area blacks; when they saw a white cop stop a black motorist, they would approach with guns drawn, demanding that the cop respect the black man's civil rights.”5 Partly under pressure from Killmonger, and with increasing knowledge of Black desperation world-wide, King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) rejects his original isolationist vision of how Wakanda should define its destiny. Yet T’Challa’s alternative vision of Black Power and Black world leadership takes awhile to develop.